_ CHAPTER XVII
THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit
January night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang
"Toy Land" and "Seeing Nelly Home"; they leaped from the
low back of the sled to race over the slippery snow ruts; and
when they were tired they climbed on the runners for a lift.
The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over the
revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped,
beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness
rattled, the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang
beside the horses, barking.
For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave
fictive power. She felt that she could run on all night, leap
twenty feet at a stride. But the excess of energy tired her, and
she was glad to snuggle under the comforters which covered the
hay in the sled-box.
In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude.
Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked
on the snow like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the
surface of Lake Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a
veritable road, a short-cut for farmers. On the glaring
expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust, flashes of green ice
blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the sea-beach--the
moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it
turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was
tropical and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no
difference between heavy heat and insinuating cold.
Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy
Pollock being connotative beside her, were nothing. She
repeated:
Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon.
The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite
happiness, and she believed that some great thing was coming
to her. She withdrew from the clamor into a worship of
incomprehensible gods. The night expanded, she was conscious
of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to her.
She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up
the steep road to the bluff where stood the cottages.
They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls
of unpainted boards, which had been grateful in August, were
forbidding in the chill. In fur coats and mufflers tied over
caps they were a strange company, bears and walruses talking.
Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in the belly of a
cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot. They
piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as
it solemnly tipped over backward.
Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous
blackened tin pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked
doughnuts and gingerbread; Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot
dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry Gould, after announcing,
"Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock line
forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky.
The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet
struck the pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry
Haydock lifted her by the waist and swung her. She laughed.
The gravity of the people who stood apart and talked made
her the more impatient for frolic.
Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum,
and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the
stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist.
In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things
in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at
them to see which was speaking.
"Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--
any one.
"Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the
lake."
"Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto."
"Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with
that Sphinx tire you got?"
"Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any
better than the Roadeater Cord."
"Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the
cord. The cord's lots better than the fabric."
"Yump, you said something---- Roadeater's a good tire."
"Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his
payments?"
"He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land
he's got."
"Yump, that's a dandy farm."
"Yump, Pete's got a good place there."
They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults
which are the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly
apt at them. "What's this wild-eyed sale of summer caps
you think you're trying to pull off?" he clamored at Harry
Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just overcharging us,
as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever tell
you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a
pretty good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human
intelligence, but one time he had his machine out in the rain,
and the poor fish, he hadn't put on chains, and thinks I----"
Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back
to the dancers, and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an
icicle down Mrs. McGanum's back she applauded hysterically.
They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled
amiably as they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed,
"There's a real sport!" when Juanita Haydock took a sip.
Carol tried to follow; she believed that she desired to be drunk
and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she saw Kennicott
frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat
too late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and
repentance.
"Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon.
"Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody.
"That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock.
They interpreted the word "making" as May and King.
The crown was a red flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's
broad pink bald head. They forgot they were respectable.
They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry:
"Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we?
It's been so much fun tonight!"
They looked affable.
"Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally.
"Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present
`Romeo and Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody.
"Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted.
"But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully
silly to have amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own
scenery and everything, and really do something fine. There'd
be a lot of hard work. Would you--would we all be punctual
at rehearsals, do you suppose?"
"You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought
to be prompt at rehearsals," they all agreed.
"Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie
Dramatic Association!" Carol sang.
She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit
snow, had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty
in the theater. Everything was solved. She would be an authentic
part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village
Virus. . . . She would be free of Kennicott again, without
hurting him, without his knowing.
She had triumphed.
The moon was small and high now, and unheeding.
II
Though they had all been certain that they longed for the
privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the
dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of
Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody,
the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon,
Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita
Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely
but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came
to the first meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled
regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that
they would be present at all other meetings through eternity.
Carol was made president and director.
She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension
the dentist and his wife had not been taken up by the
Westlakes but had remained as definitely outside really smart
society as Willis Woodford, who was teller, bookkeeper, and
janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon
dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen,
looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted.
She impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association
meeting, and when Kennicott was brusque to them she was
unusually cordial, and felt virtuous.
That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the small-
ness of the meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie
Wutherspoon's repetitions of "The stage needs uplifting," and
"I believe that there are great lessons in some plays."
Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied
elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for
recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle
of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to
present Shakespeare. As no one listened to her she sat back
and looked like Lady Macbeth.
III
The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American
drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But
of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew
from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators
called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man
named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written
plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was
discovering a history more important than the commonplace
chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities.
She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting
in a Brussels cafe and going afterward to a tiny gay theater
under a cathedral wall.
The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from
the page to her eyes:
The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and
Dramatic Art announces a program of four
one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, ard
Lord Dunsany.
She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down
to the Cities" with her.
"Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why
the deuce do you want to see those darn foreign plays, given
by a lot of amateurs? Why don't you wait for a regular play,
later on? There's going to be some corkers coming: `Lottie
of Two-Gun Rancho,' and `Cops and Crooks'--real Broadway
stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you
want to see? Hm. `How He Lied to Her Husband.' That
doesn't listen so bad. Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could
go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd like to see this new
Hup roadster. Well----"
She never knew which attraction made him decide.
She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in
her one good silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from
her chiffon and brown velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best
georgette crepe blouse. She wailed, "I haven't a single solitary
thing that's fit to be seen in," and enjoyed herself very much
indeed.
Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he
was "going to run down to the Cities and see some shows."
As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless
day with the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in
giant cotton-rolls, in a low and writhing wall which shut off
the snowy fields, she did not look out of the window. She
closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know that she was
humming.
She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris.
In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks,
farmers, and Swedish families with innumerous children and
grandparents and paper parcels, their foggy crowding and their
clamor confused her. She felt rustic in this once familiar city,
after a year and a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain
that Kennicott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the
liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging-
houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill-
tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the
rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely
fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's
arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior
person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her?
For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher
Prairie.
In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not
used to hotels; she remembered with jealousy how often
Juanita Haydock talked of the famous hotels in Chicago. She
could not face the traveling salesmen, baronial in large leather
chairs. She wanted people to believe that her husband and
she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was
faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing
the register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at
the clerk, "Got a nice room with bath for us, old man?"
She gazed about haughtily, but as she discovered that no one
was interested in her she felt foolish, and ashamed of her
irritation.
She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and
simultaneously she admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the
crown-embroidered velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the
silk-roped alcove where pretty girls perpetually waited for
mysterious men, the two-pound boxes of candy and the variety
of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden orchestra was
lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat,
in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a
broadtail coat, a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close
black hat entered the restaurant. "Heavens! That's the
first really smart woman I've seen in a year!" Carol exulted.
She felt metropolitan.
But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-
check girl, a confident young woman, with cheeks powdered
like lime, and a blouse low and thin and furiously crimson,
inspected her, and under that supercilious glance Carol was
shy again. She unconsciously waited for the bellboy to precede
her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go ahead!" she was
mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried.
The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely
out of the way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the
first time in months she really saw him.
His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent
gray suit, made by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have
been of sheet iron; it had no distinction of cut, no easy grace
like the diplomat's Burberry. His black shoes were blunt and
not well polished. His scarf was a stupid brown. He needed
a shave.
But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of
the room. She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub,
which gushed instead of dribbling like the taps at home,
snatching the new wash-rag out of its envelope of oiled
paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the twin beds,
pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to
examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to
every one she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair
and the blue rug, testing the ice-water tap, and squealing
happily when the water really did come out cold. She flung
her arms about Kennicott, kissed him.
"Like it, old lady?"
"It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me.
You really are a dear!"
He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended,
"That's a pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can
adjust it at any temperature you want. Must take a big
furnace to run this place. Gosh, I hope Bea remembers to
turn off the drafts tonight."
Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with
the most enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse,
pommes de terre a la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux
Bruxelles.
"Oh, let's---- I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my
new hat with the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for
hours, and we'll have a cocktail!" she chanted.
While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to
see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail
elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the
oysters came in--not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie
fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you only knew
how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and
order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then
watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of
food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry
about whether the pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a
great moment for me!"
IV
They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis.
After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves
and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an
optician's, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and
verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty
silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing-
boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the
department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too
many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty
perfumes--just in from New York." Carol got three books
on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself
that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how
envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes,
and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly
hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of
his car clear of rain.
They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next
morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs'
Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and
dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were
back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the evening they were
again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was
frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They
sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and
listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether
cosmopolitan.
On the street they met people from home--the McGanums.
They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well,
this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums
had come down, and begged for news of the town they had
left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home,
here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable
strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held
them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by
as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station
to catch No. 7 north.
They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational
and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No.
I Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks
and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world.
They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers
of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of
houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain
of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers
and lumbermen and real estate peers--the potentates of the
expanding city. They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows
with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick
with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible
chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They tramped through
a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall bleak
apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful
yellow brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch
with swinging couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass
bowls. Between a waste of tracks and a raw gouged hill they
found poverty in staggering shanties.
They saw miles of the city which they had never known in
their days of absorption in college. They were distinguished
explorers, and they remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet
Harry Haydock's never seen the City like this! Why, he'd
never have sense enough to study the machinery in the mills,
or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks in
Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we
do!"
They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and
felt that intimacy which beatifies married people when they
suddenly admit that they equally dislike a relative of either
of them.
So it was with affection but also with weariness that they
approached the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at
the dramatic school. Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn
tired from all this walking; don't know but what we better
turn in early and get rested up." It was only from duty that
Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm hotel, into a
stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted
residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school.
V
They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-
curtain across the front. The folding chairs were filled with
people who looked washed and ironed: parents of the pupils,
girl students, dutiful teachers.
"Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't
good, let's beat it," said Kennicott hopefully.
"All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read
the lists of characters, which were hidden among lifeless
advertisements of pianos, music-dealers, restaurants, candy.
She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The
actors moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was
beginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over.
"Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking
a sneak?" petitioned Kennicott.
"Oh, let's try the next one, `How He Lied to Her
Husband.' "
The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott:
"Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy.
Don't know as I think much of a play where a husband
actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife.
No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a leg?"
"I want to see this Yeats thing, `Land of Heart's Desire.'
I used to love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent.
"I know you didn't care so much for Yeats when I read him
aloud to you, but you just see if you don't adore him on
the stage."
Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching,
and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and
heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-
eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived,
and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small-
town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly
loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a
window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle
of twilight women and the ancient gods.
"Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said
Kennicott. "Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?"
She shivered. She did not answer.
The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they
saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two
young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing
vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions.
It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized
with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar
and unhappily put it back.
Without understanding when or how, without a tangible
change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was
conscious of another time and place.
Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen
in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the
gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants
trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with
blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the
caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of
topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the
jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above
drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel-
bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten
tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his
planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to
her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth----
"Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?"
She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.
She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking
at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights.
Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall:
"What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make
head or tail of it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-
puncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we
can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't make time by walking
over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will say for that
dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air
furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em
through the winter?"
In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for
a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc
Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main
Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and
the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world,
they really existed; but she would never see them.
She would recreate them in plays!
She would make the dramatic association understand her
aspiration. They would, surely they would----
She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning
trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising
soap and underwear.
___________
CHAPTER XVII - Novel: Main Street - Author: Sinclair Lewis _